WhatsApp finally adds voice messages

BY Stefan Constantinescu

Published 7 Aug 2013

There are more messaging apps out there than I can count: LINE, Viber, KakoTalk, WeChat, and of course: WhatsApp. They all pretty much do the same thing, let you send messages to your friends using your data connection instead of SMS, but different groups of friends in different parts of the world prefer using different clients. When I was in Taiwan, everyone was on LINE. In Thailand, WeChat was taking off. In Malaysia, it was WhatsApp.

Now when it comes to features, WhatsApp is easily the most lacking. Almost every new thing that comes to WhatsApp was done on other messaging platforms ages ago. Case in point, they’ve finally added voice messages. You can now hit and hold a microphone button and send a recording to someone.

Why would you want to do this? Sometimes it’s simply easier to say something than type. I recently cooked my girlfriend some dinner, and I sent her a photo as she was coming home from work, along with a 20 second audio snippet of me describing what I’ve made and how it was prepared. We don’t use WhatsApp, however, we use LINE.

Corny? Maybe, but hey, it’s a tool.